Use of Immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) for Surgical Planning in Neuroblastoma: A Randomized and Controlled Multicentric Clinical Trial

Neuroblastoma is one of the most common extracranial solid tumors in children. It originates from cells of the neural crest, and can be located at the adrenal level, or in the sympathetic chains from the neck to the pelvis. Surgery still remains a mainstay part of the treatment and this is particularly challenging when IDRF are present. Adequate surgical planning, based on images such as CT Scans, MRI and/or nuclear medicine is crucial. This project seeks to compare; surgical time, GTR percentage and complications between standard surgical planning with biplanar 2D images vs the use of virtual reality as a planning tool, through the segmentation and post-processing of medical images and the visualization of 3D models with immersive virtual reality glasses (VR). The software that will be used for the segmentation and generation of 3D images will be Materialise Mimics® Innovation Suite and the images can be viewed using the Meta Quest 2® virtual reality glasses and the Materialise Mimics Viewer® software, which sends the processed images to be seen only by the treating surgeon, without patient data.

The study design will be of the type of multicenter clinical trial, controlled and with simple randomization. All patients with a debut diagnosis of neuroblastoma in stage L1, L2 or M who have a surgical indication will be recruited. Surgical time, complications, amount of resection (GTR), surgeon's satisfaction as well as surgical anatomy comprehension will be compared. An invitation to participate will be sent to hospitals around the world.